MATLAB® software is a product of The MathWorks, Inc. of Natick, Mass., which provides engineers, scientists, mathematicians, and educators across a diverse range of industries with an environment for technical computing applications. As a desktop application, MATLAB software allows scientists and engineers to interactively perform complex analysis and modeling in their familiar workstation environment. The MATLAB software includes multiple toolboxes containing different mathematical solvers, where the different toolboxes may be purchased separately by a user. The toolboxes attempt to group related solvers. Thus, for example, a Signal Processing Toolbox may contain solvers that are useful for signal processing. In another example, in the Genetic Algorithm and Direct Search Toolbox, there is a genetic algorithm solver called ga and a pattern search solver called patternsearch.
A graphical user interface is sometimes provided to utilize a solver in the MATLAB environment instead of just a command line interface. For example, ga solver and patternsearch solver each have their own graphical user interface that may be used by a user instead of a command line interface using the commands gatool and psearchtool respectively. A graphical user interface can relieve a user from learning and remembering certain commands that are required to use a solver.